Windows to the World: Landscape, Architecture, and Environmentalism at the Whitney

Online, via Zoom

Thursday, December 5, 6 pm
Thursday, December 12, 12 pm
Wednesday, December 18, 6 pm

Join Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow Elizabeth H. Akant for this virtual member talk bringing together environmentalism, landscape, and architecture throughout art history and in artworks on view at the Whitney today. The idea of a painting as a window onto another world, as described by Leon Battista Alberti in 1435, permeated the medium and landscape genre in the West for the following five centuries. Twentieth-century modernism disrupted this convention, and by the 1970s, artists began to conceive alternative renderings of the landscape through a range of large-scale, site-specific, and performative artworks, unable to fit into the architectural confines of museums. 

In this program, members can explore how the Whitney’s current exhibitions, Shifting Landscapes and Survival Piece #5: Portable Orchard, demonstrate how contemporary museum architecture accommodates these ideals found in the environmentally conscious land art movement, branching off from historical definitions of landscape and breaking out of traditional approaches to museum display. From the outside, the Museum’s architecture populates the landscape of Manhattan. From within, it frames the surrounding cityscapes through its oversized windows, acting as a contemporary artwork that, like the landscape works on display, redefines Alberti’s idea of art as windows to the world.  

Elizabeth Halide Akant is a PhD Candidate in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her research focuses on global modernist movements, nationalist art after empire, and the impact of social-political and artistic milieus on artworks. Her dissertation explores how folk art invocations in Turkish painting from the 1930s–50s mediated varying populist political movements. She has lectured at Brooklyn College since 2020 and previously served as an Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Queens Museum.